Chapter Title: For a Few Comic Strips More: Reinterpreting the Spaghetti Western

through the Comic Book

Chapter Author(s): William Grady

Book Title: Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads

Book Subtitle: Studies in Relocation, Transition and Appropriation
Book Editor(s): Austin Fisher
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1bh2hs9.15

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 part iv

Routes of Relocation, Transition

and Appropriation

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 chapter 10

For a Few Comic Strips More:

Reinterpreting the Spaghetti
Western through the
Comic Book

William Grady

O ffering a punchy satire on the racism prevalent in America’s colo-

nial past, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) bound
Blaxploitation cinema with the Spaghetti Western. The titular hero is
rooted in Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966), while Tarantino’s violent
and parodic style draws upon the vision of the Old West derived from
these Italian Westerns. However, drawing upon the outrageous hyper-
violence and audacious humour of this film, one reviewer noted that it
resembled a ‘comic book nightmare’ (Bradshaw 2013). What is inter-
esting in this fleeting analogy is the implicit link drawn between the
Spaghetti Western and the comic book. Indeed, critical approaches to
the Spaghetti Western have often highlighted the presence of the comic
in the make-up of these films.
This correlation between forms was a binary underscored in the
opening to Christopher Frayling’s book Spaghetti Westerns (1981).
Focusing upon the visual style of the Spaghetti Western, Frayling
concedes: ‘Many of the films, and especially those directed by Sergio
Corbucci, relied on cutting effects derived from comic-strip graph-
ics’ (Frayling 2006: viii). Likewise, he suggests that Spaghetti Western
icons, like bizarre looking gunslingers, could be located in earlier com-
ics such as ‘Hah Noon’, from Mad #9 (1954). Closing this brief anal-
ysis, Frayling highlights how the character of the Spaghetti Western
has since become subsumed into later Western comic books, evidenced

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 214 william grady

through the Lee Van Cleef-like bounty hunter featured in Morris and
Goscinny’s bande dessinée (French comic) Lucky Luke: The Bounty
Hunter (1972).
Drawing upon this relationship, this chapter will take a similar
approach to Frayling, who mediates between comic book influences
upon the Spaghetti Western and the later reciprocal impact of these
Westerns upon the comic book. It will open by demystifying some of
the tacit references to the comic-like qualities of the Italian Westerns.
This will provide context for the chapter’s exploration of the impact of
these films upon the Western comic book, primarily achieved through
a case study of the bande dessinée series, Blueberry (1963–2005), by
Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean Giraud. In a collection that looks to
map the relocation and appropriation of the Spaghetti Western, this
chapter will reinterpret these Italian productions through the comic
book. It will elaborate upon the Spaghetti Western as a visual and the-
matic language that can be understood in relation to the comic book.
Moreover, when considering how this language is replicated through
the comics medium, the chapter will suggest that there is a form of
transcultural adaptation at play, with certain non-Italian comics having
reappropriated the anarchic spirit of these films to speak to a different
nation’s socio-political milieu.

the spaghetti western and the comic book

For the USA, the aspirational and heroic ideals of the Western genre
had held a powerful rhetoric in culture.1 However, these very tenets of
the Western would be challenged in the 1960s, which had seen the race
riots, and the development of youth movements and counter-cultures at
home, alongside the emergence of post-colonial nation states across the
globe, and a war in Vietnam. In these complex and changing times the
ideals and mythic concerns of the Western became deeply problema-
tised, and a backlash ensued in various popular forms. First manifested
in Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man (1964), this was joined by
the liberal rethinking of the history of the West in Dee Brown’s Bury
My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), and in American films like The
Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) and Soldier Blue (Ralph Nelson,
1970). This stark depiction of the brutality of the Old West was an
emphatic reaction against the conservative mythology of the Western,
which had become unpalatable for the nation in this period, ultimately
fading away into the 1970s.2 However, these conditions were pertinent
in setting a framework for the emergence of the Spaghetti Western.

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 for a few comic strips more 215

Largely popularised by Sergio Leone and his ‘Dollars Trilogy’, the

Spaghetti Westerns offered a vision of the Old West unseen on its native
shores. Replacing the geographical American West of Hollywood film,
and instead shot in the barren Spanish desert, these Westerns provided
a strange and alien vision of the Frontier terrain. At a basic level, these
films reappropriated key icons, plots, and situations from the genre,
draining them of their moral and mythic significance. However, through
the foregrounding of parody, violence and sadism, which were meticu-
lously detailed through intricate cinematic framing, an often-saturated
and overloaded soundtrack and a motley crew of bizarre characters,
the Spaghetti Westerns proved a distinct version of the genre.
Of interest to this chapter is how both critics and scholars alike
responded to certain facets of the Spaghetti Western, reading comic-
like qualities in their presentation. As noted previously, Frayling briefly
touched upon the cross-pollination between the comic book and the
Spaghetti Western, at one point terming the violence of the Italian West-
erns ‘comic strip’, and further analysis of the films of Corbucci read as
offering a ‘comic-strip style’ (Frayling 2006: xv, 236). Beyond the work
of Frayling, however, other studies into the Italian Western have noted
a similar comic book nature. Jim Kitses describes the style of Sergio
Leone’s Westerns as ‘comic-book-like’ (Kitses 2004: 253). Austin Fisher
at times uses the term ‘comic book’ to describe both the violent nature
of these films, or rather the ‘violent comic action’, as well as their slap-
stick humour, or ‘comic book exuberance’ (Fisher 2011: 157, 117).
Gaston Haustrate locates the comic strip ‘fêtes sanglantes’ (celebration
of blood/gore) in the Italian Western, suggesting such violence pro-
vided a counter-myth of the American Western (Haustrate 1971, cited
in Frayling 2006: 125), whereas Sergio Corbucci’s films were described
as ‘jokey, comic-strip movies’ when reviewed in Cahiers du Cinéma,
emphasising the shallowness of Corbucci’s work next to the emergent
politically infused ‘Zapata Spaghetti’ (Frayling 2000: 309–10).
Alongside the aforementioned analogy drawn in a review of Tar-
antino’s film, these comments seem superficial, and somewhat abra-
sive, without getting to the core of the relationship between comics’
form and the Spaghetti Western. Yet the use of the term ‘comic’3 as a
descriptive raises the question, what is comic book about the Spaghetti
Western? What is apparent is that there are two variations in these
comments – one that suggests visual or stylistic similarities between the
forms, and one that notes comic book influences upon the content of
these films (such as violence and humour). Therefore, it may be instruc-
tive to dwell upon these two notions in negotiating an answer to the
question above.

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 216 william grady

Considering first of all the visual style of these films, Frayling

touches upon visual similarities between ‘cutting effects’ in the Spa-
ghetti Western and comics sequencing, evidenced through four panels
from an Italian Western comic strip (Frayling 2006: viii). The extract
depicts a villain who is shot by a six-shooter as he looms menacingly
over his female victim. While Frayling does not explicitly engage with
the strip, it can be argued that through the image sequence which
details close-ups of faces and actions (such as the grasping hand of the
villain, and the firing six-shooter), combined with minimal dialogue
which dictates a fast reading pace from panel to panel, parallels can
be drawn between the cuts and visual layout of the Spaghetti West-
ern and the composition of the comic book. Such a notion will be
returned to when reading the impact of the Spaghetti Western upon
the comic; however, the distinct visual style of the Spaghetti Western
and its correlation with the comic may be explored further through
the work of Leone.
Leone’s cinematography spoke of his penchant for spectacle, and
effected intricate spatial strategies and highly conscious framing of
the action surrounding his gunfights. The director’s lens would hold
everything within the shot in deep focus, a token of his fastidious eye
for detail. However, one could certainly draw parallels between his
deep focus lens and the comic book – a perspective that is put forward
by the assistant director on Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966), Fabrizio Gianni. Gianni suggests
that comics in Italy were a hugely popular source of reading mate-
rial, especially the Italian Western comic, Tex Willer (from 1948). He
conceded that in spite of the filming difficulties on set, Leone tried to
replicate the comic book through the capture of wide landscapes with
everything set in focus.4 Indeed, the visual language of the comic had
been ingrained in Leone from an early age. As Frayling notes in his
biography of the director, the stories in the comics were secondary to
the ‘graphics’, which were always found to be ‘much more interesting’
(Frayling 2000: 6).
The influence of comics on the Spaghetti Western can be felt in other
respects. After meeting with Sergio Leone, Jijé, creator of the noted
French Western comic Jerry Spring (1954–77), would be a regular visi-
tor to the set of My Name is Nobody (Il mio nome è Nessuno, Tonino
Valerii, 1973), and even tasked with making a comic version of the
film – a project soon abandoned (Hamann 2002: 24). Moreover, the
form became an influential source material in other filmmakers’ work.
As noted previously, some critics make references to Sergio Corbuc-
ci’s ‘comic-strip’ style, but the comic book was also a key influence

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 for a few comic strips more 217

on the content of his films too. Indeed, the taciturn hero who drags a
coffin behind him in Django (1966) was an idea taken from a comic
book that Corbucci had picked up from a newsstand in Rome.5 How-
ever, this unusual comic book gunslinger can be read as an extension
of Corbucci’s weird vision of the Old West, as the director often pro-
nounced a taste for bizarre elements in his films. For instance, Django
foregrounded a type of hyperbolic violence, seen as the comic-book-
inspired hero pulls out a Gatling Gun from the coffin he drags around,
wiping out a full army platoon, all the while remaining unscathed.
Likewise, Corbucci’s use of parody was taken to extremes, with West-
ern clichés like the taciturn gunslinger becoming a mute with a scarred
neck in The Great Silence (Il grande Silenzio, Sergio Corbucci, 1968).
The eccentric dark humour and the exaggerated violence that mark
Corbucci’s work, and, more broadly, other Spaghetti Westerns are
often bound to comic book analogy (see the aforementioned quota-
tions from Fisher, Frayling and Haustrate). The use of ‘comic book’
as a descriptive in such cases can be understood as a throwaway ref-
erence to the simplicity of the comics form. Indeed, the American
newspaper strips of the nineteenth century were known for their
caricature/cartoon style, slapstick humour, and marginally intelligible
pidgin English, which appealed to an emerging literate lower class.
From this, the comics form would grow to become inherently sub-
versive and hyperbolic as the narrative form developed in the twen-
tieth century.6 While the form’s history was marked by periods of
decline and renewed innovation (especially in the final quarter of the
twentieth century through adult underground comix and the birth of
the graphic novel), comics until the late 1960s were produced almost
exclusively for children.7 The comics’ ‘innocuousness, naivety and
juvenility’, Sabin generalises, are ‘characteristics that most people
associate with them today’ (Sabin 2010: 23). Therefore, critics’ use
of the term ‘comic’ to describe elements of the Spaghetti Western may
draw upon such characteristics – a reference to the form’s tendency
to deal with hyperbolic violence and audacious humour on a level
of childlike simplicity, often drained of moral complexity. However,
drawing such comic book analogies with instances of absurdity that
mark the Spaghetti Western does not grasp at the core of a more inter-
esting connection the Italian Western bears with the comic.
At a basic level of comparison, this connection can be read through
the distinction between Hollywood’s West and the West of the comic
book and the Spaghetti Western. As Lusted suggests, Hollywood’s
‘popular representation of the West is The West to most people’ (Lusted
2003: 9). Indeed, while the Western is a fictional landscape of stories

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 218 william grady

with a resonant vocabulary which refers to a historical moment – filmed

on location in the American West, and complete with American actors,
and authentic attire and props – the Hollywood Western delivered a
photorealistic vision of America’s mythic past. However, in contrast
with the Hollywood Western, even in the case of the most detailed and
realistic comics artist’s illustrated imaginings of the genre, the artwork
is intruded upon with speech balloons, and comics’ language such as
the ‘BLAM’ from the six-shooter, and the ‘SMACK’ from the cowboy
fistfight. Such language can impeach the artist’s vision, drawing the
reader’s attention to the fictional and constructed Western space of the
comic book.8 Likewise, the Spaghetti Westerns, which were often made
up of an international cast, and shot in the Spanish desert, provided an
unfamiliar vision of the American West. This was heightened further by
stylistic elements, such as the swooping zoom-in shots from the camera,
alongside obvious over-dubbing of the foreign cast members, which
could arguably remind an audience of the artificiality of these West-
ern productions. These formal details highlight the hollow façade of
this reconstructed Western space that both forms of the genre inhabit.
However, beneath the façade of this imagined Western space, comics
creators and Italian filmmakers alike were able to infuse revisions and
embellishments into the formal vocabulary of the genre, making this
reconstructed Western space much more alien than the traditional West.
Regarding the Spaghetti Western, Jim Kitses loosely touches upon
this kind of bizarre Old Western space through his study of Sergio
Leone’s films. He picks upon Leone’s disorientating extreme and dream-
like contrasts in his cinematography; an iconic style which creates an
expressionist spectacle for the taciturn hero, the hysteric villains, and
other absurd characters which frequent the film world (Kitses 2004:
255), continuing that such a surreal vision of the American West ‘keeps
the audience off balance, making the familiar genre strange’ (Kitses
2004: 253). While Kitses focuses upon Leone’s West, which he describes
as a form of ‘making strange’, this can readily be extended to more
broadly incorporate the world that the Spaghetti Western inhabits. This
is a world that is awash with absurdity, bizarre characters, and resistant
visions that challenged the status quo of the traditional Western.
Building upon the aforementioned exaggerated violence and dark
humour of Corbucci’s films, instances of hyperbole marked other Spa-
ghetti Westerns. The ‘Sartana’ Westerns were known for their trick
weaponry and gadgets. Light the Fuse . . . Sartana is Coming (Una nuvola
di polvere . . . un grido di morte . . . arriva Sartana, Giuliano Carnimeo,
1970), sees a full-size church organ transform into a cannon. The sub-
sequent artillery fire from the organ pipes massacres a regiment of
Mexicans. Sergio Leone’s gunfights were also often marked by peculiar

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 for a few comic strips more 219

sequences, from the duel in For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro
in più, 1965) in which Mortimer is able to shoot Manco’s hat from his
head from a long distance, to Cheyenne comically luring a villain to his
death by shooting at him through his own boot which he lowers from
above the train window in Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una
volta il West, 1968). Moreover, the various ‘Trinity’ Westerns (which
starred Terence Hill and Bud Spencer) heavily foregrounded the eccen-
tric humour that the Spaghetti Westerns were known for. For instance,
in Trinity Is Still My Name (Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità, Enzo
Barboni, 1971), the barroom standoff scene descends into a humorous
slapping match between Trinity and his foe. However, this unusual vision
of the American West was nothing new, and long before the Spaghetti
Western the comic book had already detailed its own peculiar vision of
the Old Frontier.
Maurice Horn argues that ‘if the medium is the message, then the
message of the comics, with their flouting of the rules of traditional art
and of civilized language, can only be subversion’ (Horn 1976: 50).
Indeed, in the hands of the comic book creator, the Western became
a site of surreal and anarchic possibilities. As early as the 1930s, the
comic strip vehemently parodied the genre’s reliance on racial stereo-
types. Strips like Little Joe (Ed Leffingwell, 1933–72), often humor-
ously characterised the archetypal white cowboy as moronic next to
the cunning Native American, who often outwitted these would-be
exploiters on each encounter. These instances of Western parody and
satire could be located in later strips like Stan Lynde’s Rick O’Shay
(1958–81), which continued this humorous tradition with characters
like the banker, Mort Gage, and a child named Quyat Burp (an obvi-
ous play on Frontier hero Wyatt Earp). Yet the illustrated nature of
the comic opened up the form to eccentricity, allowing for the explo-
ration of wacky possibilities unexplored in other forms of the genre.
For instance, T. K. Ryan’s irreverent anti-Western strip, Tumbleweeds
(1965–2007), located the iconoclastic fervour surrounding the genre
in the 1960s through burlesque humour and a caricatured Old West,
whereas Magazine Enterprises’ Ghost Rider (Dick Ayers, 1950–4) pro-
vided supernatural visions of the Frontier through the adventures of a
phantom gunslinger. Meanwhile, Charlton Comics extended this use of
unlikely protagonists with Black Fury (1955–6), which narrated adven-
tures in the Old West from the perspective of a horse.
Such subversions to the generic space may draw upon Verano’s sug-
gestion that the comic book inhabits the world of the ‘fictional signifier’,
which can offer hyperbolic possibilities unfixed from our own reality
(Verano 2006: 326). However, such subversions may also be read in
tandem with Kitses’ ‘making strange’. This may take away from the

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 220 william grady

throwaway description ‘comic’, and point at a more interesting con-

nection between both forms of the genre, which inhabit the West of the
imagination – a strange and exotic Western space rich in an unusual
mix of parody, eccentricity, melodramatics, and unrealistic action and
bizarre violence. In these terms, phantom gunslingers can exist, church
organs can second as cannons, and it is possible to shoot a hat from
someone’s head from a distance.
With this context in mind, it can then be argued that there is a much
more vital negotiation between the comic and the Spaghetti Western
than what critics in the past have tacitly referred to – from inform-
ing visual style (as Gianni suggests about Leone’s deep focus lens), to
its hyperbolic content (in the case of Corbucci’s unusual comic book
inspired gunslinger). Critics have at times likened such eccentric con-
tent to the moral simplicity of the comic, such as in the aforementioned
review in Cahiers du Cinéma (referenced in Frayling 2000: 309–10),
which criticised Corbucci’s bizarre Westerns as being jokey ‘comic-
strip movies’. Nevertheless, such analogies fail to grasp at a more solid
connectivity of forms, which divert from the traditional Western and
instead foreground a peculiar and absurd vision of the Old West. Such
absurdities that mark the West of both the Spaghetti Western and the
comic book can be understood through Kitses’ concept of the ‘making
strange’ – offering pronounced subversions of the Western, and inviting
a resistant reading. However, in developing upon the cross-pollination
between both forms of the Western, it is instructive to begin to look at
the reappropriation of the Spaghetti Western, and chart the impact of
these Italian productions upon the Western comic book.

reading the spaghetti western in comics

The Spaghetti Western would become an iconic version of the genre,
its reverberations felt through future Western productions. This is most
clearly evidenced in the subsequent Westerns of Clint Eastwood, such as
High Plains Drifter (1973). However, this impact was not felt just in cin-
ema, and later Western comic books found ways of replicating the visual
lexicon and character of these films onto the page. Such influence upon
the comic book can be evidenced through a number of titles, with the
illustrated nature of this literary form allowing for the register of visual
references to the Spaghetti Western; apparent in culturally disparate
comics traditions, from Yves Swolfs’s Belgian title Durango (from 1980)
to Min-Woo Hyung’s manhwa (Korean comic) Priest (1998–2007).
One example of this in practice can be seen in Figure 10.1, an extract
from Azzarello and Frusin’s violent Western, Loveless (2005–8). The
sequence emphatically replicates the distinct formal layout surrounding

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 for a few comic strips more 221

Figure 10.1: Loveless replicates the form of a Spaghetti Western

showdown. From ‘Loveless’ #1 ™ and © Brian Azzarello and Marcelo
Frusin. Courtesy of DC Comics. Available in Loveless: A Kin of
Homecoming

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 222 william grady

the gunfights of the Spaghetti Western for dramatic effect. In Leone’s

films, before the quick violent denouement to these sequences, they were
characterised by glacially slow tension–building close-ups of details,
eyes and faces. Leone suggested that these long preambles were to reflect
‘the last gasps that a person takes just before dying’ – a space to invite
his audience to contemplate the moment of death (Frayling 2000: 291).
Kitses describes such jarring shots as producing a ‘fragmenting and
abstracting effect’ (Kitses 2004: 253). Arguably, the fragmented panels
of this static printed medium conjure a similar effect. Frusin’s artwork
meticulously reconfigures the tension-building close-ups into a series of
panels, which dwell upon details, from the hand that hovers over the
holstered gun, to facial features and gritted teeth. The turn of the page
culminates in a series of splash panels depicting gunslinger Wes Cutter
quickly dispatching his would-be-killers – a bloody climax to the tense
previous page. While film and comics are separate and unique forms, it
is apparent that the iconic cinematic style of the Spaghetti Western can
be reproduced through the specifics of comics composition.9
Leone used the ‘fragmenting and abstracting’ close-up to other
effect. For instance, the eyes of a character could act as a window into
the past. In Once Upon a Time in the West, the meeting of Harmonica
and Frank’s eyes in the final showdown allows the characters to share a
memory of a previous encounter in which Frank murders Harmonica’s
brother. However, in his previous film, For a Few Dollars More, Leone
had embellished this device with visual effects. In one scene where
the antagonist, Indio, smokes marijuana, the camera closes in upon
the character’s intoxicated eyes, with the shot’s fade quickly followed
by a flash of red which signals the film’s jump to a past memory of
rape and murder that haunts the character. The camera effects and the
use of the colour red are underscored with a twinkling soundtrack by
Ennio Morricone, which turns more shrill and piercing as the horrific
scene unfolds.10 Such an expressionistic vision of murder can be seen
reinterpreted in Figure 10.2, an extract from Jodorowsky and Boucq’s
Bouncer: Raising Cain (2004). We see the young character Seth finally
come face to face with the villains who murdered his family. As his eyes
meet with the murderers’, we are transported to Seth’s memory of these
villains slaughtering his dog, beheading his father, and raping his step-
mother. These memories of murder, coloured red, provide visual clues
to the language of the Spaghetti Western. Lacking a surreal soundtrack,
Jodorowsky provides the mantra ‘murderers’, repeated through each
red-coloured panel to create an equivalent jarring effect.
These sequences are just some examples elaborating upon how cre-
ators of the Western comics have since absorbed the visual language of
the Spaghetti Western into their own visual storytelling. However, this

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 for a few comic strips more 223

Figure 10.2: Alejandro Jodorowsky and François Boucq’s Bouncer: Raising

Cain utilises the visual language of the Spaghetti Western’s flashback
sequences. Courtesy of ©2014 Humanoids, Inc. Los Angeles.

raises the question, why, or to what purpose, is the Spaghetti Western

reappropriated and reinterpreted for the comic book? Through a case
study of the French bande dessinée series, Blueberry, by writer Jean-
Michel Charlier and artist Jean Giraud, the chapter will now seek to
distil a broader range of examples of the intertextual negotiations at
play. Using close textual analysis, the chapter will examine references
to the Spaghetti Western apparent in the Blueberry series, and attempt
to place its significance within the publication context.

case study: BLUEBERRY

Beyond the Italian Westerns, many other countries held an obsession

for the Western. Jean Giraud suggests ‘the Western is perceived as
something extremely exotic’ and that its ‘story takes place in a soci-
ety with few rules, and in a framework where there is always more
open, unexplored space ahead. This is something very powerful and
appealing to a European’ (Charlier and Giraud 1991: dust jacket).
Such allure would encourage local versions of the genre to emerge in

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 224 william grady

various national comics traditions long pre-dating the Spaghetti West-

ern, and even pre-dating the advent of mainstream narrative cinema.11
Indeed, for France, the Western was a feature in bande dessinée as
early as 1889 when Christophe, in his La Famille Fenouillard, would
confront the titular family with Native Americans. In the twentieth
century, notable Western bande dessinée series included Marijac’s Jim
Boum (from 1934), Morris’s Lucky Luke (from 1946) and Jijé’s Jerry
Spring (from 1954). However, a law passed in 1949 – Loi du 16 juillet
1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse – drafted between the
French Communist Party and Catholic pressure groups prohibited the
depiction of violent and licentious material from the pages of bande
dessinée out of fear of its corrupting effects upon juveniles. Thus, these
French Western comics bore hallmarks of the 1949 censorship law,
which limited creative freedom through dictating content to be geared
towards a young readership.
This would change in the 1960s owing to an emergent young adult
and student readership, and with the form keeping pace with devel-
oping textual formats – an emerging magazine culture led to comic
magazines like Pilote (from 1959). Such titles, typically sold on news-
stands, bypassed the restrictive nature of the 1949 law, allowing for
more mature themes and content to be explored in the pages of bande
dessinée. This fundamental renewal of the medium which was taking
place allowed for a more serious handling of the Western genre for
bande dessinée, realised through titles such as the Blueberry series,
which made its first appearance on the pages of Pilote in 1963.12
Charlier and Giraud’s Blueberry centres upon the undisciplined army
lieutenant Mike ‘Blueberry’ Donovan and his adventures in the Old
West. The series can be understood as a Western epic of the comic book
form, spanning some twenty-eight albums (until 2005), and traversing
various epochs in post-Civil War American history: from the coming
of the railroad, to the Indian Wars. The earlier part of the series is set
amid the American Southwest, where Blueberry has been stationed at
an isolated Fort in Arizona, tasked with maintaining relations with the
surrounding Native Americans. Throughout the 1960s, the Blueberry
albums were greatly preoccupied with the Indian Wars: a plot focus
that can be likened to a traditional Western narrative of cowboys and
Indians. Regarding such a vision, Giraud concedes that early influences
upon his work included directors of the classic Hollywood Western,
like John Ford and Anthony Mann (Thompson 1987: 93).
These influences can be seen in Giraud’s artwork, and his highly
detailed rendering of the Frontier (see Figure 10.3). Commanding a

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 for a few comic strips more 225

Figure 10.3: Jean Giraud’s Blueberry artwork registers the influence of

Hollywood landscapes. From La piste des Sioux, 1971.
© DARGAUD, by Charlier and Giraud.

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 226 william grady

powerful vision of the West, his work can be likened to the cinematic
idealisation of the Frontier landscape found in Hollywood Westerns.
For example, John Ford’s magnificent desert scenes, which often saw
stagecoaches or galloping horses framed against the immense buttes of
Monument Valley, provided a phantasmagorical image of America’s
mythic past. Giraud can be seen directly referencing this powerful
landscape at certain points in the first Blueberry album, Fort Navajo
(1965). Here, similar buttes from Monument Valley can be found in
the background of desert sequences (see for instance Charlier and
Giraud 1965: 6).
Despite referents to its Hollywood counterpart, the Blueberry series
also encapsulated an emerging cultural resistance in France and offered
a commentary on contemporary issues. One case in point could be
the uncomfortable retelling of Manifest Destiny in Blueberry, a bleak
depiction of American imperialism culturally removed, yet read in tan-
dem with, France’s recent colonial past.13 Blueberry himself is another
marker of this resistant inclination, a character who is visually mod-
elled upon the Nouvelle Vague anti-hero Jean-Paul Belmondo. His
character in films like Breathless (À bout de souffle, Jean-Luc Godard,
1960) came to represent the modern loner paradigm, and the anarchist
(Nochimson 2010: 54). His childlike emulation of Humphrey Bogart’s
performance through his character in the film can be read as a critique
upon the hollow façade of Hollywood cinema through these empty
gestures. This visual mockery of American icons and his anarchic dis-
position can also be discerned through Blueberry. He is a character who
does not represent the classic Western hero, but is instead an undisci-
plined and cynical soldier who hates authority. When we are first intro-
duced to the character in the opening pages of Fort Navajo, we find
him cheating at a gambling table (Charlier and Giraud 1965: 1–3). This
conflation of American archetypes with an emerging resistant French
culture was a tendency that would heighten later into the 1960s.
The social and political upheavals that came about surrounding the
riots of May 1968 had a profound impact upon French culture.14 This
insurrection Caute describes as generating ‘radical chic’ (Caute 1988:
227). In cinema, this is apparent in the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who
broke with the classic rules of filmmaking in favour of revolutionary
and propagandist collages in his films. In the case of bande dessinée, in
the aftermath of 1968 the medium became more socially and politically
subversive, pushing the boundaries of subject matter. The medium was
vital in providing alternatives to the mainstream and formed the first
main channel of youth protest in late 1960s France (Baetens and Surdi-
acourt 2013: 356). Artists nurtured earlier in Pilote magazine now felt

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 for a few comic strips more 227

that the severe editorial style was placing a restraint upon work, and
a rebellion ensued with emergent counter-culture publications. Bande
dessinée heroes like Hergé’s Tintin, seen shooting up with heroin in one
feature, were treated with derision in these comics (see Fluide Glacial
#21, 1978). Indeed, adult themes were now being foregrounded in the
pages of bande dessinée, mostly achieved through overt sexual con-
tent and violent gory sequences. In the case of Blueberry, this context
can be read through the character’s Belmondo looks, which began to
fade and become more rough-hewn. More broadly, the series would
shed its classic Hollywood Western façade, heading south of the border
and into Spaghetti Western-tinged adventure. In an interview, Giraud
recounts: ‘Watching Leone’s movies gave me a big visual shock, and
totally impacted my own vision of the American West’ (Charlier and
Giraud 1991: dust jacket). Indeed, in the aftermath of 1968, Giraud’s
vision of the West began to change, becoming more violent and surreal.
‘Apaches? Bandits?’, Blueberry questions as he hears distant gunshots
while making his patrol through the desert, soon realising: ‘Mexicans!
But what the hell . . .’ (Charlier and Giraud 1989).15 This encounter with
the Mexican army occurs in the opening pages of Chihuahua Pearl (Char-
lier and Giraud 1973): an album which would begin the longest cycle of
the series. It tells the fictional tale of Confederate General Edmund Kirby
Smith, who fled to Mexico after the Civil War. Smith is said to have hid-
den Confederate gold somewhere in Mexico, and Blueberry is hired to
track down this bounty. The titular hero still plays out his French anar-
chic tendencies, falling from grace with the American authorities in this
cycle. He becomes a fugitive accused of the attempted assassination of
President Ulysses S. Grant, and repeatedly attempts to clear his name.
More significant is how the series’ traditional Western bearings began
to be swept aside. The thriving prairies and the focus on the Native
American, which can be summarised through Figure 10.3, began to be
replaced by a more arid and surreal tone. Figure 10.4 visually hints at
this new tone, articulated through the establishing of markers of setting,
including barren deserts, cemeteries, and desecrated churches. Even
the clashing colour definition in which this extract (and the title more
broadly) is painted – shades of yellows and oranges, alongside purples
and blues – was indicative of a more bizarre detour for the series. These
iconographic inclusions may draw upon the Spaghetti Western vision,
but narrative clues work in unison to aid this atmosphere. The series’
overt disillusionment with how the West was won was sidelined with
a quest for gold in Mexico. This is heightened further through Smith’s
gold being buried in an unmarked grave, in an abandoned ghost town –
a clear nod to Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

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 Figure 10.4: The more surreal and arid imagery of later Blueberry comics. From Ballade pour un cercueil, 1974.
© DARGAUD, by Charlier and Giraud.

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 for a few comic strips more 229

Beyond iconography and narrative focus, other parallels can be

drawn with the Spaghetti Western. A significant element of the Ital-
ian Western was the means by which they detached the genre’s innate
violence from its moorings in US national identity, dealing with it in
much more amoral terms. A screen ostentatiously crammed with dead
bodies, alongside the brutality enacted upon characters, were common-
place in these Westerns. Such violent scenes in Leone’s work were con-
demned as ‘downright sadism’ in one review (Clapham 1974: 146).
The work of Corbucci also favoured bloody violence – often to a more
bizarre effect. Beyond the infamous ear-severing scene in his Django,
which would earn the film a ban in Sweden, the violence of the film
was inscribed with Corbucci’s dark humour. For instance, the grue-
some denouement of the film, where Django’s hands are brutalised by
soldiers forcing a new shooting method – using a gravestone to aid the
firing of his weapon – is said to be a joke in reference to jazz guitarist
Django Reinhardt, who invented a new playing style when some of his
fingers were paralysed in a fire.
Violence was always present in the Blueberry series. However,
through the maturation of the form in the years after May 1968 the
series became respondent to bande dessinée’s counter-cultural tenden-
cies. In a similar manner to the Spaghetti Western, the Blueberry series
began to foreground a type of violence unfamiliar to the genre. The
kind of en masse indiscriminate killing depicted in these films can be
evidenced in the album, Ballade pour un cercueil (Charlier and Giraud
1974a). When Blueberry and his motley group find the gold, they take
refuge in an abandoned church surrounded by the Mexican Army. In
a sequence reminiscent of Giulio Questi’s Django Kill . . . If You Live,
Shoot! (Se sei vivo, spara!, 1967), their escape plan capitalises upon
horses strapped with dynamite, which are sent out into the Mexican
line of fire first, with brutal consequences. Giraud graphically details
the exploding animals, the blood and bones gruesomely blown from
the horses’ flesh, while the flames from the blasts force Mexican troops
into the line of fire from Blueberry’s gang (Charlier and Giraud 1974a:
31–2). Beyond these bloody sequences, Sergio Corbucci’s unusual con-
flation of dark humour and violence can be read through the series. For
instance, in the album Angel Face (1975), the titular assassin, whose
effeminate beauty allows him to pass as a woman, meets a grisly end
at the hands of Blueberry. After Angel Face frames Blueberry for the
attempted murder of President Grant, Blueberry confronts him on a
steam train. This fight sequence ends with Angel Face falling face first
into the hot coals of a train’s engine. ‘What’s your name, son?’ the

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 230 william grady

Sheriff asks the terribly burned assassin, whose face is bloody and blis-
tered beyond recognition. ‘Angel–Angel F–Face!’ he replies (Charlier
and Giraud 1990).
Beyond the dark humour and violence that enriched these films, the
other distinct aspect of the Spaghetti Western was the garish and sur-
real tone they presented. Most of these films were shot in Spain, allow-
ing desert settings to appear as disturbing alien terrains for the taciturn
heroes and the bizarre villains to inhabit. Leone provided disorienting
contrasts in his cinematography through glacial set pieces, jarring close-
ups, and vast panoramas of the desolate landscape. Ennio Morricone’s
soundtrack worked in unison, applying sonically bizarre effects to the
often loud and saturating music, creating an analogy with the violent
action, or complementing the strange dreamlike sequences. To evidence
this surreal feel to Leone’s cinematic language, the Baxter massacre
scene from his A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari, 1964)
is a useful example. The close-ups of the sweating and scarred faces
of the Rojos are quickly cut with images of their many victims being
shot to death. The fire from the burning Baxter residence dramatically
lights the faces of these murderers, and their maniacal laughter haunts
the scene. The quick to and fro between images of death and mania-
cal faces makes for a disorienting and nightmarish vision of murder.
Such haunting scenes are balanced with Leone’s dreamlike sequences.
The aforementioned scene from For a Few Dollars More, where we see
Indio transported to a past memory of rape and murder, showcases a
variety of camera effects, a jarring soundtrack, and the use of colour to
create a discomforting set piece.
This combination of effects from the film language illustrates the
surreal tone that marked the Spaghetti Western. However, attempting
to extrapolate this into the Blueberry series may seem difficult con-
sidering how facets of this atmosphere, such as the sonically bizarre
soundtrack, would be lost through the printed comics medium. Instead,
this language can be read through other elements of comics form such as
colour. In the early albums of the Blueberry series, Giraud honed a nat-
uralistic palette in keeping with this traditional vision of the Old West.
However, in the surrounding milieu of 1968, Giraud began experiment-
ing with subjective colours, rejecting the former naturalistic approach.
For instance, scenes of heavy dialogue can see characters in one panel
marked in natural tones of colour, only to be painted in bright pastel
colours in a following panel. This psychedelic quality marked not only
characters, but the scenery also. For example, in Ballade pour un cer-
cueil, bizarre-shaped boulders are seen in pinks and blues, and there are
rivers of red and yellow, alongside instances where prairies and brush

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 for a few comic strips more 231

have been rendered in shades of blue. This bizarre use of tonal shades
also helped define time and place, from desert landscapes set in blazing
oranges and yellows to define the perishing heat of the midday sun to
nighttime sequences in dreamlike purples.
This bizarre use of colour is certainly medium-specific, and beyond
the use of red to mark the past memories of murder in the Spaghetti
Western it was not commonplace in Western films. However, the hal-
lucinatory effect that the colour provides in the comic can be bound to
some sequences in the Spaghetti Western. For instance, in Leone’s The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Eastwood’s character, ‘Blondie’, is sub-
jected to cruel torture, held captive and dragged through the desert by
Tuco. Leone uses fades between each shot, not only to suggest a sense
of time unfolding, but also to create a surreal and delirious tone, delin-
eating the harsh and exhausting heat of the desert. Leone shoots the
desert not to appear like the American West, but like a nightmarish ter-
rain, while Tuco’s pink parasol that decorates some shots adds a bizarre
twist to this long torture scene. Figure 10.5 is taken from the album
Le hors-la-loi (Charlier and Giraud 1974b), and a scene where the US
Army has imprisoned Blueberry. In a similar manner to ‘Blondie’, Blue-
berry has been forced to march in the blazing heat of the desert by his
captors. Giraud’s artwork offers a similar hallucinatory effect to the
scene from Leone’s film, but achieved through specifics of form. Painted
in tones of orange and yellow, the extract emphasises the desert heat.
Giraud replaces the traditional use of panels, and instead each instance
in the sequence of Blueberry’s torture is pieced together through smoky
waves from the desert’s dust clouds. This delirious effect works in uni-
son with Blueberry’s thought bubbles, which start out as a tangible
sentence indicating his plan to kill Kelly (the Commanding Officer who
has ordered this cruel torture), but end in ‘W . . . water kill’ as the char-
acter breaks under the sun. This effect is intensified by the two ortho-
dox square panels in the top right corner, which depict Commander
Kelly watching Blueberry’s torture from the safety of the indoors (and
painted in cool shades of blue). This juxtaposition of the hallucina-
tory desert panel, broken up through smoky waves, and the more rigid
panels of the indoor scene suggests a separation between reality and
Giraud’s surreal and nightmarish desert.
In an interview regarding the Western, Giraud dramatically asserted
that ‘Leone changed everything’ (Thompson 1987: 93). Indeed, Leone
and his fellow directors of the Spaghetti Western revised the genre
for the cinematic frontier. However, in a similar manner, it could be
suggested that Charlier and Giraud’s Blueberry was making dramatic
revisions to the genre in comics form. While this may certainly be

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 Figure 10.5: The hallucinatory artwork of the 1974 Blueberry album, Le hors-la-loi. © DARGAUD, by Charlier and Giraud.

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 for a few comic strips more 233

owed to the Spaghetti Western, since the series borrowed facets of

these films, arguably, these were reworked to become form-specific.
For instance, the oppressive sonically bizarre soundtrack of the Spa-
ghetti Western now became unusual psychedelic colours and halluci-
natory panel composition.
Unlikely sources, such as the war film Kelly’s Heroes (Brian G.
Hutton, 1970) and the comedy film The ’Burbs (Joe Dante, 1989),
featured sequences which looked to replicate Leone’s cinematic lexi-
con (from a Morricone-like soundtrack, to close-ups of the eyes, or
the tank’s gun turret with regard to Kelly’s Heroes). These inclu-
sions can be considered a form of homage, reappropriating the Spa-
ghetti Western’s language to humorous effect. However, Charlier and
Giraud’s inclusions of icons, themes and aesthetics of the Spaghetti
Western may have moved beyond basic homage. The Blueberry series
throughout the 1960s was largely bound to its classic Western influ-
ences. Yet in the intense political and social upheavals surrounding
1968, bande dessinée took on an iconoclastic fervour, while fore-
grounding social and political subversions. Blueberry can be read as
a product of this discord. Through the reappropriation of the shock
violence and the surreal edge of the Spaghetti Western, Charlier and
Giraud allowed their traditional series to keep pace with the develop-
ments of the medium, which was itself becoming more surreal, violent
and licentious. However, amid the harsh atmosphere that the creators
were foregrounding, the series spoke of the revolutionary zeitgeist
that was occurring in France. Strong female figures in the series were
pronounced, such as Chihuahua Pearl, which reflected the improved
status of women in post-1968 France. Meanwhile, the series espoused
anti-militarist sentiment, which was lodged deep in anarchist ideology
surrounding 1968. Figure 10.5 is useful in representing this warning
of military power, as a fellow officer is seen to question Commander
Kelly’s brutal torture of Blueberry: ‘Isn’t the punishment you’re giving
that man, er, a little, er, uh . . .?’ (Charlier and Giraud 1989).

conclusion
Through the broad overview that this chapter has provided, it is clear
to see the vital interplay between the comics form and the Spaghetti
Western that has emerged. Detailing a number of perspectives in
which comic book influences can be read through these films – from
informing visual style, to co-inhabiting a similar bizarre Old Western
space – makes it apparent that the comic book has played a greater

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 234 william grady

role within the Spaghetti Western than the one scholars and crit-
ics have fleetingly referred to in the past. Furthermore, inclusion of
the Spaghetti Western’s cinematic language into later Western comic
books highlights the ongoing iterative nature of cultural develop-
ments. The comics form is an eminently suitable visual narrative form
with which to replicate the cinematic language in which the Italian
Western spoke. Moreover, as the case study of Blueberry elaborated,
the Spaghetti Western can arguably be framed as an accessible, visual
and thematic language that can be repurposed to respond to differ-
ent cultural dynamics, and to social and political discord in other
countries.

notes
1. The Western in many ways defined the nation in the years before the 1960s. The
haunting schemas of the myth of the West were able to trigger a yearning for the
idealised past lodged deep in the American psyche. In politics, the term ‘Frontier’
marked John F. Kennedy’s acceptance speech in 1960, whereas the term ‘cowboy
diplomacy’ could be used to understand the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.
In advertising, the Western became a powerful image to sell to America through
idealised images of a mythic past – the Marlboro Man (the smoking cowboy)
is indicative of this. Most significant, however, was how political discourse and
ideology could be grafted onto commanding visions of the Old West in various
popular narrative forms. For instance, the film Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) used
the powerful vistas of Monument Valley to narrate the mythic narrative of regen-
eration through the challenge of the wilderness, whilst effecting a pro-interven-
tionist position in the run-up to World War II. Such mythic potential highlighted a
precedent for the Western of popular culture, and how it could speak to American
hopes and fears.
2. In terms of the number of Western films being produced, Table 1 in Buscombe’s The
BFI Companion to the Western indicates the dwindling production figures of the
genre into the 1960s and 1970s (1990: 426). Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation (1998),
Coyne’s The Crowded Prairie (1998) and Corkin’s Cowboys as Cold Warriors
(2004) are just some examples among many cultural histories of the Hollywood
Western, exploring how the genre’s narrative conflicts and thematic tensions cor-
responded with issues in twentieth-century US society – from the idealised Western
of the post-war years to the anti-Westerns and subsequent waning of the genre in
the 1960s.
3. In etymological terms, ‘comic’ grew out of the comical drawings and amusing
short essays and droll verse offered in Life, Puck, and Judge – dubbed ‘comic
weeklies’ (Harvey 2009: 36). While the medium developed in both form and
content from out of this precursory material, the term ‘comic’ to describe the
medium remains.

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4. Personal correspondence with John McShane (email, 24.3.2014). McShane is

co-founder of www.scottishscreenwriters.co.uk, is on the committee of the Glasgow
International Film Festival, and is a comics historian – his research is largely con-
cerned with the first Scottish comic, The Glasgow Looking-Glass (1825).
5. Ruggero Deodato, assistant director on Django, recounts this anecdote in the
documentary ‘Django: The One and Only’ – a special feature attached to the Blue
Underground DVD version of Django (Blue Underground, 2007).
6. Some examples of early newspaper comic strips include Richard F. Outcault’s The
Yellow Kid (from 1895), Rudolph Dirks’ The Katzenjammer Kids (from 1897),
or Frederick Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan (from 1900). For an overview of the
subversive and resistant nature of comics from their late nineteenth-century news-
paper strip roots to their status in post-World War II America, see Wright (2001),
Hajdu (2008) and Sabin (1996, 2010), the latter of which offers some interesting
parallels through the study of British comics.
7. It was the form’s nature as juvenile, ephemeral reading material – with its subversive
and undermining demeanour, crass humour and stark depiction of violence – which
was the impetus for the censorship of comics in the 1950s: an attempt to sanitise
the medium of violent and licentious material. For studies of comic book censorship
in the USA, see Nyberg (1998), Wright (2001: 109–79) and Hajdu (2008); and for
Britain see Barker (1984) and Sabin (2010: 23–35).
8. Christine Bold further argues that such comics language not only serves to
remind readers ‘of comics’ artifice and their melodramatic absurdities’, but that
in the Western comic ‘these textual gestures can be interpreted as inviting a
resistant reading of the plot, thereby undermining the narratives of law and
order’ (Bold 1996: 38).
9. For a more rigorous engagement with the workings of the comics’ form see
McCloud (1994) and Groensteen (2007).
10. Director Giulio Petroni would develop upon this effect in Death Rides a Horse
(Da uomo a uomo, 1967). Here, the protagonist is haunted by the memory of his
family being massacred, which is presented superimposed over the character’s eyes.
The flashback scene is coloured in red, with a bombastic soundtrack by Morricone
adding to this haunted, sadistic scene on screen. Petroni’s take on this effect was
more recently reused in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003).
11. Maurice Horn provides an overview of Western comics from South America,
Europe and Asia (Horn 1977: 137–74). Randall W. Scott (2007) provides a closer
look at Western comics from Europe (particularly France, Germany and Italy).
12. A concise overview of this period of bande dessinée’s history can be found in Miller
(2007: 15–24). For a mediological account of bande dessinée’s development as a
medium, see Baetens and Surdiacourt (2013).
13. The Algerian War (1954–62), only a few years behind the Blueberry series, was still
an uncomfortable referent in culture. The film The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di
Algeri, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) would be banned for five years by the French govern-
ment upon its release, highlighting that the country was still attempting to escape its
recent colonial past. A similar affair took place in bande dessinée: McKinney notes
that ‘from the outbreak of the Algerian War until 1979, [colonialism] was almost

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 236 william grady

non-existent as a theme in French comics . . . By contrast, French cartoonists [had]

often emphasized the preceding period of colonial rule as a time of exotic adventure’
(McKinney 2013: 146).
14. The protests of May 1968 in France were a series of escalations led by students
and workers, espousing left-wing causes, communism or anarchism. Many saw
the events as an opportunity to shake up society in many aspects, including meth-
ods of education, the improved status of women, and sexual freedom. For a sum-
mary of the events of 1968 France and their later impact upon culture, see Caute
(1988: 183–239).
15. When referencing the collections of Blueberry that have been translated into
English through Graphitti Designs (these are unpaginated), I have tried for the
sake of clarity to include a reference in text to the original French album in which
these quotations/references originally appear.

references
Azzarello, Brian and Marcelo Frusin (2006), Loveless – Volume 1: A Kin Homecoming,
New York: DC Comics.
Baetens, Jan and Steven Surdiacourt (2013), ‘European graphic narratives: toward a
cultural and mediological history’, in Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon (eds), From
Comic Strips to Graphic Novels, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 347–62.
Barker, Martin (1984), A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror
Comics Campaign, London: Pluto Press.
Bold, Christine (1996), ‘Malaeska’s revenge: or, the dime novel tradition in popular
fiction’, in Richard Aquila (ed.), Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in
Popular Culture, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 21–42.
Boucq, François and Alejandro Jodorowsky (2004), Bouncer: Raising Cain, New York:
Humanoids/DC Comics.
Bradshaw, Peter (2013), ‘Django Unchained – review’, The Guardian, 18 January.
Buscombe, Edward (1990), The BFI Companion to the Western, London: BFI.
Caute, David (1988), Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricade, London: Paladin
Books.
Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1965), Fort Navajo, Paris: Dargaud.
Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1971), La piste des Sioux, Paris: Dargaud.
Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1973), Chihuahua Pearl, Paris: Dargaud.
Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1974a), Ballade pour un cercueil, Paris:
Dargaud.
Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1974b), Le hors-la-loi, Paris: Dargaud.
Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1989), Moebius 4: Blueberry, Anaheim, CA:
Graphitti Designs.
Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1990), Moebius 5: Blueberry, Anaheim, CA:
Graphitti Designs.
Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud (1991), Moebius 9: Blueberry, Anaheim, CA:
Graphitti Designs.

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